Russia Starts to Study Black Sea Flight Recorder

SOCHI, Russia (AP) — Russia’s transport minister says investigators have begun to study one of the flight recorders from the plane that crashed into the Black Sea but says it’s still “too early to speak” about what caused the crash.

All 92 people onboard the Russian military Tu-154 plane are believed to have died in Sunday’s crash shortly after takeoff from the southern Russian city of Sochi.

Rescue workers early Tuesday found one of the flight recorders on the sea bed about a mile away from the shore.

The defense ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that the flight recorder, which has been flown to a ministry lab outside Moscow, did not sustain considerable damage. The ministry says experts will need to clean the black box in distilled water before they begin to retrieve data from it.

Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov told Russian news agencies later Tuesday that the investigators studying one of the flight recorders have no information yet pointing to one just one theory about the cause.

Sokolov repeated, however, that Russian authorities have no information that would make them to believe it might have been a terror attack and they saw no possible security breach at Sochi’s Adler airport.